The morning after an event, a friend sends a group picture. Phone ding, watch buzz, and here I am in the crisp birth of morning, opened to God like a newborn settling in for sustenance. I sit in the quiet beauty, eyes closed, hands empty, soul wholly-gulping the intimate holy.  This oneness I know to […]

It comes to me, the freedom in not needing to know, like the tickle of a wild wind on my emptied palms, when a friend asks what time our flight, Kevin’s and mine, leaves for Boston. We walk down a greenway trail, around a bend I’ve never seen, in a place I’ve never been, near […]

As Riley and Adam and I run beneath a sapphire sky, I keep time in blooms like lace gently swaying in trees that just weeks ago still stood beseeching, their empty limbs desperately reaching for God.  And now, it’s as though creation breathes again for the first time, newborn, naked and filling with life, all […]

Unraveling heavy things, my friend tells me a story about taking her kids to see the dinosaur exhibit at the museum. “In the beginning…” She doesn’t use those words, not exactly, but she might as well have, because right from the beginning it feels as though her story belongs to me too somehow, belongs to […]

“You should try this on,” my friend says.  “These are your colors.” These are your colors.  Of course, she means the dress she has pulled out for me, the one that swirls with Autumn colors—olive, tangerine, crimson, gold, but I am thinking how, in scripture, a robe of colors means a robe of grace, how […]

The moment Adam and his friends take the stage, their faces lighten with sudden recognition, as though with the stage lights beaming and the violins singing and the performance blooming, they have all at the same moment just realized they can dance.   Their mouths relax into broad grins, and gradually their lips slide apart, and […]

My body groans this morning, acutely I feel it crumbling, as Kevin and I head out for an early run, searching for renewal, and not just of muscles and tissues and cells.  Be transformed by the renewing of your mind, the apostle Paul wrote, and as our feet begin to tap staccato, I remember the […]

From the sixteenth floor of The Carolinian, Kevin and I watch the sunrise.  We sit on the balcony, sipping steamy coffee, gasping over the vastness of the sea, stunned by the silvery surface of the water reflecting the sky, threaded suddenly with amber and gold. The perspective up here on the balcony reminds us of […]

As we step onto the path, past the gravel and asphalt and through an arbor of trees to the place where the air grows light and cool, I realize two things: I am not wearing the right shoes for this hike, and consequently, I need a walking stick. Roots ripple across the path, rising up […]

“It’s so pretty out here,” I say, the words like an exhale. Golden brown leaves skitter across the asphalt, and everywhere I look I see another vibrant shade–the sky, cool blue; the trees, a sunset arch sheltering our pathway. I breathe a prayer, remembering something C.S. Lewis said, something that fits: We do not want […]